Painting Faces: Being a Life of that Capital Artist, Joseph Wright of Derby
 
In the late 1740’s a gauche, provincial boy from a small Midlands market town, dreamed of becoming a leading painter of British high society – and failed.
Instead, he became something far greater. He created pictures that captured the spirit of his age but which we now see as having transcended it: timeless images of inquiry, reason and discovery.
Standing at the tipping point between the old, rural and agrarian Britain, he captured the first leading shoots of the industrial age which was being created all around him.
As a man, Joseph Wright was complex, often troubled and melancholic and certainly hypochondriac, but also supremely gifted. Marrying late to Ann, a much younger woman from a lower social class, he eloped to Italy to complete his artistic training – but also to avoid the censure of his family and the gossip of his town. Turning his back on the cut-throat art-world of the capital, he steadily made his way amongst the coming men of the century: Erasmus Darwin, Josiah Wedgwood, Richard Arkwright, his neighbour and mentor John Whitehurst, and his equally talented fellow artist George Romney. Joe’s story winds through Georgian London and Bath, the slavers’ and merchants’ salons of newly-rich Liverpool, the intelligentsia of the Lunar Society and the country houses, mines and mills of the Peak District. But beyond the canvases and their many portraits, there was a pain and a remorse that had to be endured and, somehow, resolved.
Painting Faces tells the story of his struggle as both an artist and as a man.